The Three Pillars Part 2 – Cart Abandonment Recovery
Cart abandonment recovery can literally make or break your business.
The Three Pillars of eCommerce Part 1
Most people have heard about cart abandonment, but they don’t
understand how bad it is across all eCommerce stores, not just their
store.
Cart abandonment is simply this:
- Someone goes to your eCommerce store.
- They add product to the cart and go to the Checkout Page.
- Then they don’t complete their purchase and leave your store.
Cart abandonment is like an epidemic – it’s really bad.
One of the big reasons for cart abandonment is that people are busy.
They’re distracted.
You’ve probably abandoned a cart before. We have for multiple
reasons. When we look at how busy people are and what a distracted
world we live in, it makes sense.
Let’s look at some staggering numbers.
The average cart abandonment rate across all industries
in eCommerce is 70%-80% across all devices – desktop,
laptop, tablets, and mobile.
That means seven out of ten people that put a product in your cart
leave WITHOUT completing their purchase. You’ve probably noticed
this on your store.
It’s normal to have 70%+ of your shoppers abandon their cart without
checking out. If you have ten people add a product to their cart on your
store, you will have at least seven out of those ten leave WITHOUT
completing their purchase. This is… crazy! Learning these numbers blew
us away.
That means that unless we do something about it, out of all the effort
you put into getting people to your store, 70% of the ones that Add to
Cart ABANDON.
This means that a good portion of your efforts to get
the traffic you sent to your store – whether paid or organic – was wasted.
Unless you can figure out how to get people back to checkout.
When we look at the cart abandonment for mobile devices exclusively,
it is even worse at an average of 85%!
Why is that? Simple.
If you’re on a mobile device, you’re probably doing something and
can be easily distracted. Mobile devices magnify the reasons people
abandon.
There are many reasons for this, including connectivity issues
and website functionality issues, which we’ll talk about a little later.
Up to 8.5 people out of ten abandon your store’s shopping cart.
eCommerce brands lose $18 billion in sales revenue each year
because of cart abandonment.
This is from 2020 stats, so the number is probably higher now.
$18 billion.
We didn’t tell you all this to get you gloomy. We told you this
because the more you know about these averages, the more informed
you are. This gives you better decision-making information you can use
to improve your store’s performance.
Just remember that it is NORMAL for 7-8 out of every ten people
that add a product to the cart on your store to leave WITHOUT
completing the buying process.
It’s not because your product is weird. It’s just normal. Hopefully,
your number is not that high, but that’s what it is on average.
Things are about to get really exciting.
There is something called Cart Abandonment Recovery.
Why People Abandon Shopping Carts
Why do people abandon their carts? We’ll give you some stats.
These are not “the baby’s crying.” They are statistical. They are
taken from surveys. The statistics we’re referring to have been proven
repeatedly.
Reason #1: Extra or Unexpected Costs
The number one reason shoppers abandon their cart is because they
see extra costs on the Checkout Page. Remember, cart abandonment is
when they come to your eCommerce store, add a product to their cart,
go through the checkout process, but do not complete the purchase.
Here’s a tip.
If your shipping cost is too expensive, that could be a reason people are leaving. There are different ways to fix this. People are spoiled now by Amazon and others that offer free shipping. Amazon Prime is around $100 a year and anyone can get “free” two day shipping.
People expect low shipping costs now. That can be a challenge for
us as eCommerce store owners because shipping costs are expensive and
only getting more expensive. With COVID, it was a mess (2020-2021).
Supply chain issues will be a problem for a long time. Shipping costs will
only increase. And with gas prices soaring in 2022, it’s getting worse.
But there are ways around it.
You can get creative on how to overcome the shipping hurdle. Just
remember that 70% of the reason people abandon is for unexpected
extra costs once they got to check out.
Maybe it’s high shipping fees. Maybe it’s some other fee. Maybe it’s
a packaging fee. Maybe it’s sales tax…
If the number one reason people abandon carts (by a long shot) is
extra costs, be sure that you have no surprises when people get to the
Checkout Page.
It’s definitely okay to charge shipping. It’s okay to have
free shipping available once they spend a certain amount or get creative
to make the impact less. But they need to know what to expect before
you hit them with the total.
You want to be conscious of your shipping fees and any additional
charges that people might incur.
Reason #2: Forcing People to Create an Account
If the unexpected costs account for 70% of cart abandonment, this one’s
34% (yes, the numbers add up to over 100% because sometimes there
are multiple reasons for cart abandonment). If you force a customer to
create an account when they check out, they are more likely to abandon
it.
Shopify makes it optional to create an account, but some other
platforms make it mandatory. We’ll always have it optional so people
can check out as a guest.
You’ve probably abandoned a cart rather than create an account.
We’ve done it. We don’t want to create an account, depending on what
we’re buying. We’re thinking, “If I’m creating an account, they’re going
to start spamming me with emails and have my personal info.” It’s just
not a pleasant experience.
Reason #3: Slow Load Time
Here’s one that’s a shocker. 57% of shoppers will abandon if they have
to wait three seconds for a page to load. That’s crazy.
It wasn’t many years ago when we would wait several minutes just
to check our email. With AOL, it took three hours for the page to load.
Even for you to connect to the Internet it took a minute. Now, we live
in this ultra-fast world where people leave if your page doesn’t load in
three seconds.
Shopify is hosted and it’s fast. If you use WooCommerce or other
platforms, you may have to put them on a server – and you’d better get
the Mac Daddy hosting plan, or your site will be slow. With Shopify, if
you use a good theme without huge images or a ton of apps, a store will
load fast.
Reason #4: Discount Codes Don’t Work
46% of shoppers abandon a cart because a discount code doesn’t work.
This goes back to the unexpected costs issue, too. If you say you’re
going to offer a discount, make sure your coupon codes or Checkout
Page works properly.
If your shipping costs are too high, if you force people to make an
account, if your page loads slowly, and if your discount codes don’t work,
nobody’s checking out.
Check these things on your store.
Realistically, you can expect 70 to 80% cart abandonment. If you
plan on it, you can work on a solution. The unexpected is what can cause
failure. As we continue, we’ll talk about ways to improve this.
Are your shipping costs way too high/out of line? It’s okay to charge
for shipping, but it just doesn’t need to be crazy high. You can raise your
product price a little bit and drop your shipping cost. That’s a little secret
that we do sometimes. We raise the product price just a tad and knock a
few dollars off the shipping to get it to where it’s more reasonable. You
can do that, too.
Do you force people to make an account? If so, just turn that off.
Does your page load slow? Fix it!
Those are some things that can immediately reduce your cart
abandonment.
Work on decreasing cart abandons first.
Now lets look at ways to “Recover” Abandoned Carts
You literally can double your sales if you recover only three out of
the seven abandoned carts. This is what we’ve been able to accomplish
on our sites.
People had intent to buy, and they just didn’t buy. We must figure
out how to get them to come back to your store and buy.
If you do some aspect of cart abandonment, there may be some
improvement. You should be getting 2 or 3 out of the seven to come
back to your website.
We use an omni-channel approach to send out reminders. You can
use one or all of them:
- Facebook Ads retargeting
- Google Ads retargeting
- Display ads
- Native ads
- and SMS texting
We want to re-target people with some reminder of what they were
going to purchase.
“Oh hey, I was going to buy that. I needed that, but the dog started
barking and I had to go see what was going on. I forgot that I was
buying something.”
“I got distracted because the phone rang, and all of a sudden I forgot
about it.”
Then, maybe they see an ad on Facebook or on Google, or maybe get
an email that reminds them of the product they were interested in. This
encourages them to come back and make the purchase.
As you can see, retargeting cart abandonments across multiple platforms is powerful. Focus on recovering abandoned carts and you could massively
improve your sales and profitability.
The Three Pillars of eCommerce Part 1
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